Adam Gamwell and Emily Kennedy

Abstract

This research note presents findings from a literature review examining the relationship between engaged journalism and ethnographic practice. Responding to journalism’s contemporary crises of trust and legitimacy, engaged journalism has articulated strong principles of community-centeredness, reciprocity, and care. Drawing on scholarship from journalism studies and ethnography, this note identifies a striking pattern: engaged journalism practitioners already employ a number of ethnographically oriented methods—prolonged engagement, reflexive positioning, relational accountability—without recognizing them as such. This unacknowledged borrowing limits what engaged journalism can access: anthropology offers decades of methodological refinement, ethical frameworks developed through its own reckoning with extractive research, and pedagogical resources that could deepen engaged practice. By making this ethnographic connection visible, we propose “ethnographic reporting” as a recognizable category within engaged journalism—one that names what practitioners are already doing and connects them to a deeper well of resources.

Keywords: ethnographic reporting, engaged journalism, reckoning, immersion, cultural anthropology, applied anthropology

Résumé

La présente note de recherche fait état des résultats d’une revue de la littérature sur la relation entre le journalisme d’engagement et la pratique ethnographique. En réponse aux crises contemporaines qui secouent la confiance et la légitimité dans le domaine, le journalisme d’engagement a articulé des principes solides centrés sur la communauté, la réciprocité et le care. S’appuyant sur des travaux en études journalistiques et en ethnographie, la présente note relève une tendance frappante : les tenants du journalisme d’engagement mettent déjà en œuvre certaines méthodes qui s’inspirent de l’ethnographie (engagement prolongé, positionnement réflexif, responsabilité relationnelle) sans pour autant les reconnaître comme telles. Cet emprunt non reconnu limite ce à quoi le journalisme d’engagement peut accéder : l’anthropologie dispose d’une richesse méthodologique raffinée au fil des décennies, de cadres éthiques développés à la suite de sa propre remise en question de la recherche extractive, ainsi que des ressources pédagogiques qui pourraient enrichir la pratique engagée. En rendant explicite cette connexion ethnographique, nous proposons le «journalisme ethnographique » comme une catégorie reconnaissable au sein du journalisme d’engagement, une catégorie qui nomme les méthodes qu’emploient déjà les praticiens et qui leur donne accès à un réservoir encore plus riche en ressources.

Mots-clés :  journalisme ethnographique, journalisme d’engagement, remise en question, immersion, anthropologie culturelle, anthropologie appliquée

Research note | Note de recherche

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Ethnographic reporting meets engaged journalism and offers untapped resources

Adam Gamwell and Emily Kennedy

 

 

Introduction

Ethnography is merely ‘slow journalism.’ (Duneier, 2014, as cited in Conover, 2023, p. 1)

Journalists are the junkyard dogs of ethnography. (Harrington, 2003, p. 90)

The comparisons between ethnography and engaged journalism make for great bumper stickers, yet only a small percentage of journalism’s junkyard canines explicitly describe their work as ethnographic (e.g., Sims & Kramer, 1995; Harrington, 2003; Conover, 2023; Tett, 2021; Shroder, 1994; Lett, 1994). Interestingly, decades of scholars have noted the reflection of ethnographic principles in reporting (e.g., Lett, 1986; Allen, 1987 and 1994; Bird, 2005; Gillespie, 2012; Cramer & McDevitt, 2014; Conover, 2023; Moestrup, 2025). Over time, however, these attempts have become fragmented and lack synthesis with modern journalism approaches. Several such approaches fall under the umbrella of engaged journalism (Robinson, 2023).

As our research aims to show, the emergence of engaged journalism as a response to journalism’s modern challenges has seen even greater adoption of approaches that appear ethnographic—yet the connection is not always explicit. Ethnographic reporting offers credible solutions for certain challenges to the profession, such as gaining trust. In addition, a reckoning with representational harms that anthropology initiated decades ago offers an important additional roadmap for how journalism may mature. Together, these notions bolster the argument of “ethnographic reporting” as an engaged journalism designation, not yet fully recognized by scholarship.

Because “engaged journalism” is a term used throughout the article, the authors wish to clarify this definition. This article focuses on what Nelson (2019) calls “production-oriented engagement”: How journalists build relationships with communities, involve them in newsgathering, and orient their work toward trust and civic action (Robinson, 2023; Li, 2024). We distinguish this from “reception-oriented engagement”—metrics like clicks, shares, and time spent—and from post-publication audience development strategies aimed primarily at revenue (Batsell, 2015). The literature uses “engaged” and “engagement” interchangeably, often conflating these distinct orientations (Green-Barber, 2018). Throughout this article, we use “engaged journalism” to refer specifically to production-oriented practice; where we quote sources using “engagement,” the reader should assume this meaning unless otherwise noted.

As the field evolves, engaged journalism has articulated powerful principles and demonstrated developing methodological frameworks. Meanwhile, journalists practice several methods that reflect long-term, ongoing refinement and ethical reform. Terms such as “immersion,” “lived experience,” and “reflexivity” are used to describe core tenets of engaged newswork—called “participant-observation,” “emic perspective,” and “positionality,” respectively, in ethnography. This profusion of terms can mask some of the basic similarities in approach that ethnography and journalism share, and consequently confuse the scope of ethnography’s use in journalism. The gap between principle and practice leaves engaged work ad hoc, difficult to teach, vulnerable to institutional skepticism, and at risk of repeating the extractive mistakes that the discipline of anthropology has grappled with.

This analysis does not conflate ethnography with engaged journalism, nor does it attempt to reconcile disciplinary vocabularies. Rather, we map the constellation of ethnographic currents flowing through engaged journalism work and ask why practitioners so rarely name them as such. While the methodological connections are evident, the recognition is not. We propose “ethnographic reporting” as a category within engaged journalism that makes this connection explicit—naming practices (prolonged immersion, participant observation, reflexive positioning, collaborative accountability) that engaged journalists already use. Recognizing these methods as ethnographic opens access to anthropology’s substantial body of work: refined methodologies based in scientific rigour, ethical frameworks forged through decades of reckoning with extractive research, and pedagogical resources.

Anthropology’s relevance to engaged journalism isn’t just its decolonizing ethics—it’s the discipline’s broader turn toward applied, community-serving research. As researcher Steffen Moetsrup, referencing Anne Kristine Hermann, articulated:

Ethnographic reporting is relevant not only as a practice but as a critique of journalistic norms. It questions the myth of neutrality and reframes objectivity as transparency and responsibility. As Anne Kirstine Hermann (2016) argues, it offers a genre with epistemic, strategic, and stylistic dimensions: it alters how journalists know, how they act, and how they communicate to an audience. In journalism studies, it bridges theory and practice. It can be read alongside qualitative research, anthropology, and literary non-fiction offering students and scholars a way to investigate journalism as a social encounter, not just a profession. (2025, p. 271)

Perhaps more importantly, this bridging of theory and practice goes further into acknowledging, re-historicizing and mending many elements of journalism’s past. Anthropology has already started walking the path of reckoning with a harmful history—with its first steps taken over 30 years ago. In comparison, as we will show, the scholarship on journalism’s reckoning with similar representational harms is comparatively nascent. Here too exists an important roadmap ethnography offers to engaged journalism. While decolonizing frameworks like the First Nations principles of ownership, control, access, and possession (OCAP^®) help to prevent extractive research, the modern ethnographic methods of applied anthropology provide models for research that actively serve community-defined needs. Engaged journalism requires all of the above: a reckoning with past practices, ethical guardrails, and practical methodologies for useful knowledge production.

Ethnography: Definitions, crises, and reckonings

Ethnography developed from a convergence of British social anthropology, American cultural anthropology, and the Chicago School of Sociology (O’Reilly, 2009).^[1] At its core, it is a methodology for understanding human social life from the inside: the researcher enters a social world, participates in its rhythms, and attempts to understand how members make meaning of their experiences. Its distinguishing features are prolonged engagement and participant observation—simultaneously participating in social life and observing it with analytical rigour. Seeking and building community trust has long been a hallmark of ethnographic practice (Gillespie, 2012). Crucially, the epistemological goal of this orientation is not detached documentation, but empathy—an understanding that emerges through relationship, through what Stoller (1997) called “[lending] one’s body to the world” (p. xvii).

It is worth noting that prolonged immersion, while central to the academic tradition, takes different forms depending on context and resources. Applied and design anthropology have developed time-compressed variants, including rapid ethnographic assessment (REA)—team-based, multi-method fieldwork conducted over weeks rather than months (Bentley et al., 1988)—and patchwork ethnography, which assembles cumulative fieldwork across fragmented encounters over time (Cardoza et al., 2021).The authors note that the methodological principles this paper advances are also relevant across these forms, not only the traditional year(s)-long fieldwork model.

However, we do examine the traditional model due to its extractive past. Anthropology’s confrontation with its own extractive origins is instructive for journalism. Early anthropological work often served extractive colonial interests, treating non-European peoples as subjects to be documented rather than peers in knowledge production.

The postmodern critique that emerged through the 1980s and 1990s—crystallized in Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986)—challenged the profession to confront how power, privilege, and positionality shape knowledge production and raised fundamental doubts about researchers’ authority to represent others’ lives. The reflexive turn that followed demanded researchers examine how their involvement influences, acts upon and informs their research—what Burawoy (1998) formalized as the extended case method

This reckoning reverberated across three converging lines of critique. The first came from Indigenous scholars, practitioners and community members. Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) delivered one of the discipline’s most influential challenges, asking: “Why should we continue to be the private zoos for anthropologists?” (1969, p. 99). Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) extended this, arguing that Western research paradigms were (and many still are) “inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism,” demanding Indigenous control over research questions, methods, and outputs (p. 1).

Second, applied anthropologists challenged work that produces knowledge with little benefit to the communities studied. And third, internal critics deconstructed representation politics, arguing that interpretive methods risk treating culture as a text whose meanings are knowable to the ethnographer while under-attending to the lived and affective dimensions of cultural life (Crapanzano, 2010).

In response, the discipline developed both ethical accountability frameworks and practical methodologies that have radically reshaped how ethnography is practiced. These are not separate from ethnographic method—they are now embedded. Indigenous data sovereignty principles (OCAP^®, an acronym for the principles of ownership, control, access, and possession. See First Nations Information Governance Centre, 2014; CARE, an acronym for Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics. See Carroll, et al., 2020) have reframed who controls research and its outputs; relational accountability has redefined the researcher-community relationship; participatory models (Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR); (Participatory Action Research (PAR)) have made communities co-producers of knowledge rather than subjects of study.

These reforms matter for engaged journalism because journalism now faces a similar reckoning—arriving at it just slightly later. Understanding how anthropology responded to its crisis of representation helps clarify what resources are available and why engaged journalism’s unacknowledged connection to ethnography remains a missed opportunity.

Reckoning as connector

Callison and Young (2020) make this temporal gap explicit, criticizing journalism’s slow response in contrast to anthropology:

This is a time of experimental thinking in journalism, and here we see parallels to the field of anthropology in the 1980s both in terms of declarations of crisis and rapidly globalizing audiences and collapsing hierarchies of knowledge and power. (p. 210)

Drawing from the seminal work of anthropologists Marcus and Fischer (1999), Callison and Young observed that rather than doubling down on methods that had secured its academic position, anthropology put forward “a reckoning with how much the terrain for describing and comparing the world had changed—and propose[d] listening to voices outside of academia, some of whom were sharply critical at that time of the usually Western white gaze employed by anthropologists” (p. 210). Crucially, anthropology sought not to regain lost authority but to recast it as responsive to critique. Callison and Young argued this reorientation could be applied directly to “journalism and its profound crisis” (p. 211).

Journalism’s progress toward community-centered practice has a long arc, beginning with the public journalism movement of the 1990s (Rosen, 1999). That movement arose as a response to a growing erosion of trust between press and public—what Robinson (2023) traced to the profession’s increasing distance from civic life. Crucially, however, public journalism operated largely within journalism’s established professional epistemology. Despite an emphasis on serving the public, scholars on objectivity (as well as journalists) of this era largely ignore concerns related to gender, race, and colonialism (Callison & Young, 2020). Public journalism reformed the profession’s civic orientation—who it serves, how it convenes deliberation—while leaving substantially intact its claims to objectivity and professional authority (Compton, 2000).

Early calls for methodological exchange appeared during this period. Allen (1994) compiled essays on ethnographic methods in journalism; Bird (2005) connected emergent forms like cultural journalism and new journalism to ethnographic methods, arguing the anthropological approach could help reporters during industry transformation; McDevitt and Cramer (2014) noted compatibility between community-oriented newspapers and ethnographic journalism’s goals.

Yet these calls gained limited traction. The approximately 35-year gap between anthropology’s crisis of representation (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) and journalism’s (Clark, 2022; Schmidt, 2023) reflects differences in disciplinary timing and professional structures. By the mid 1990s, anthropology had been reckoning with its positionality for at least a decade while journalism remained in civic-reform mode, without confronting the deeper representational questions that would later animate convergence. Anthropology’s relative insulation from market pressures may have enabled an earlier, internally driven confrontation with colonial legacies; journalism’s entanglement with commercial imperatives and professional autonomy norms perhaps deferred its reckoning, even as conditions accumulated.

Engaged journalism developed significantly through this period: Batsell’s (2015) documentation of digitally engaged newsrooms helped establish the contemporary terminology, and by 2020, community-oriented engaged journalism had developed meaningful practice (listening sessions, trust-building frameworks, participatory story selection) (Wenzel & Nelson, 2020). What it had not yet confronted was the deeper epistemological question underlying those practices—who holds narrative authority, from what standpoint, and with what accountability to the communities it was reporting on.

The murder of George Floyd produced that reckoning. Schmidt (2023) documented how journalists of colour forced a profession-wide confrontation in which, he argued, “fundamental moral norms of journalism are not only being vigorously contested but also rearticulated and renegotiated” (p. 549). Clark (2022) framed this as an unprecedented challenge to journalism’s ethical canon—its claims to objectivity, balance, and professional authority. This was not the beginning of journalism’s trust crisis, but it was the moment when journalism could no longer manage it within its existing epistemological framework.

It is this rupture that reframes the relationship between engaged journalism and ethnographic practice. By 2020, engaged journalism had already developed community-accountability orientation, relational principles, and institutional momentum. What the reckoning forced into view was the epistemological scaffolding those principles had been missing. Anthropology faced the same crisis earlier than journalism, developed responses to it, and built methodological infrastructure that journalism approaches. That is the historically grounded convergence this paper underlines—one that Callison and Young (2020), writing from both disciplines, pointed toward.

Ethnographic currents in practice

Where is the borrowing evident? The subsections that follow trace correspondences between engaged journalism and ethnographic methods across four domains: immersion and participant observation, embodied knowledge, trust-building, and reflexivity.

In each case, the vocabulary differs—for example, “community engagement” rather than “fieldwork,” “lived experience” rather than “emic perspective;” but, the underlying methods align.  And in each case, anthropology’s dual transformation—decolonizing ethics and applied orientation—offers resources that engaged journalism is already drawing on, often without recognizing their origins.

Immersion and participant observation

Listening sessions, embedded reporting, neighbourhood beats, community-based collaborations—these signature engaged-journalism practices function as de facto participant observation (Schmidt & Lawrence, 2020). Journalists practicing engaged methods spend sustained time in community spaces, building relationships through repeated encounters and participation in routine activities.

Both traditions recognize that understanding emerges through continued presence. Duneier observes that ethnography “seeks to go beyond what people might say in interviews and to reveal understandings that emerge only after countless interactions over the course of time” (cited in Conover, 2023, p. 1 )—precisely what engaged journalists pursue through sustained community presence.

Embodiment and situated knowledge

Drawing on sensory ethnography and sentient geography, Francoeur (2021) argued that the journalist’s body serves as a research instrument in three ways: as a sensor that gathers internal and external signals during fieldwork, as a transducer that analyzes and translates embodied experience into findings, and as a depository that stores embodied knowledge for future work.

This framework connects journalism to phenomenological traditions in anthropology that understand knowledge as situated and generated through embodied presence rather than extracted from a distance. As Francoeur (2021) explained, conceiving “the journalist’s body as an instrument that simultaneously senses, transforms, and stores information opens the door to a rich and nuanced understanding of how sensing bodies participate in and contribute to the journalistic endeavor” (p. 202).

Though they don’t connect directly to phenomenology or embodiment literature, Conover (2016) and Ehrenreich (2001) both exemplify embodied storytelling through their own reporting: situated knowledge that emerged only through sustained physical presence in unfamiliar social worlds. Conover’s sustained immersion in freight-hopping culture and prison guarding, and Ehrenreich’s embodied experience of low-wage labour, produced accounts of social life that distance-based reporting could not have accessed. Wilson (2019) positioned both as exemplars of a reflexive approach to immersion that is explicitly conscious of its own epistemological stakes.

(Re)building trust

Trust is central to engaged journalism’s aims (Robinson, 2023; Stroud & Van Duyn, 2023). Robinson’s (2023) How Journalists Engage organized nine journalistic movements under the umbrella of “movements working towards building trust in mainstream information flows” (p. 46)—yet did not include ethnographic reporting among them. This omission underscores how unrecognized the ethnographic dimension of engaged work remains.

The connection, however, is substantial. Ethnographic practice treats community members as authorities on the significance of their own lives (Cramer & McDevitt, 2004). Bird (2005) argued that journalists should reframe interviews as mutual cooperation aimed at seeing the world from the source’s perspective. Conover (2023) and Tett (2021) described how participant observation enabled deeper, more empathetic reporting than conventional methods allowed. These reflections align closely with engaged journalism’s call to rethink journalist-community relationships (Robinson & Johnson, 2023; Yahr, 2018; Lewis et al., 2014).

Where this alignment becomes most concrete—and most contested—is in practices around verification and narrative authority. McDevitt and Cramer (2004) argued that “if journalists are to tell stories from the standpoint of a particular group, the individuals observed must participate to some extent in verification of how the meanings of their lives are portrayed” (p. 132). This challenges standard journalism ethics, which maintain clear authorial boundaries. Yet emerging practices occupy a middle ground: trauma-informed approaches share text with survivors and community co-production models shift journalists from narrators to facilitators (Watson, 2023; Craven, 2022). These remain somewhat experimental, but anthropology’s experience with relational accountability (Wilson, 2008) and Community-Based Participatory Research suggests collaborative verification can enhance accuracy while addressing power imbalances, contributing to methodological rigour through relationship, not despite it.

Reflexivity, objectivity, and bias

Both engaged journalism and ethnography have moved away from “objectivity” understood as view-from-nowhere neutrality—toward transparency about standpoint and method. Robinson (2023) argued that an identity-aware ethic of care could allow journalists to set aside their “mantle of objectivity” (p. 21); engaged journalism more broadly challenges traditional notions of balance (Robinson et al., 2016; Medeiros & Badr, 2022).

McDevitt and Cramer argued that applying ethnography’s tactics for bias reduction require “an abandonment of routines such as the reliance on official sources and the goal of creating balance by juxtaposing conflicting views of ideological elites (Tuchman, 1978; Gans, 1980)” (p. 132-133). Bird (2005) had a similar argument: “the richness and complexity offered by the anthropological perspective can be a valuable corrective to the simplistic notion of ‘balance’—that the story is complete when one has spoken to a designated spokesperson from ‘each side’ of an issue” (p. 302).

Holism is a tenet of the anthropological perspective, one which may be a solution to redefining balance (Allen, 2005; Lollar 1994). Giving voice to the insider’s perspective is one way this approach can help journalists go beyond “balance.” As Lollar (1994) observed, “the media anthropologist attempts to knit the emic and etic explanations into something of a whole cloth, approximating the truth as she or he understands it in terms the subjects themselves would recognize as having merit” (p. 37). Media anthropology scholar Susan L. Allen (1987) even went so far as to suggest adding a “w” for “whole” to the fundamental checklist of five journalistic w’s (who, what, when, where and why).

Again, these compatible goals of engaged journalism and ethnography (to redefine objectivity) may come as a result of having faced similar critiques about who gets to tell the story. Where the notion of objectivity in newswork has undergone much scrutiny from academics for several decades now (e.g., Durham 1998; Ettema & Glasser, 1998), so too has the application of objectivity in ethnography (e.g., Geertz, 1973, Clifford and James, 2010, Smith, 1999). In response, ethnographers have become more reflexive, with the practice of noting both their physical presence and social positions (termed “positionality”) now commonplace in ethnographies; in tandem, reflexivity is emphasized in engaged journalism work (e.g., Mason, 2023) with some contemporary engaged and nonprofit newsrooms drawing on ethnographic studies of investigative outlets and fact-checking groups (Shin & Miller, 2022) to understand and “repair” journalistic fields, folding that reflexive knowledge back into how collaboration and sharing are organized.

Conclusion

Our synthesis of existing literature illuminates how much engaged journalism already shares with ethnographic practice. Ethnographic reporting is a form of engaged journalism—one that names what practitioners are already doing and connects them to a deeper archive of methodologies than the movement has yet claimed. What appears across the literature is not disciplinary convergence, but two fields responding—at different moments—to crises of authority, representation, and legitimacy by turning toward communities, relationships, and reflexive knowledge production. Naming this connection matters—not because anthropology has “solved” the problems engaged journalism now faces, but because ethnographers have been working on such closely related challenges for longer, and have developed resources with which practical and pedagogic engagement is worthwhile. Anthropology’s reckoning with extractive research is ongoing, not complete; its methodologies continue to evolve. The same is true for engaged journalism. That shared, unfinished work is precisely what makes the connection valuable.

As a work in progress, this paper has mapped only part of a larger constellation. The Centre for Anthropology and Journalism hopes to continue its work to illuminate the possibilities and limits of this alignment of ethnographic reporting as engaged journalism. Future research might examine:

• how engaged newsrooms are experimenting with ethnographic reporting methods, and which are most effective;
• where journalists could help ethnographers engage a general audience;
• how ethnographic reporting could assist in solving the disengagement dilemma as it relates to newsmaking business model(s) (e.g., revenue and subscriptions); and
• where emergent and established methodologies in ethnographic work could further be borrowed by engaged journalism.

Making ethnography visible within engaged journalism does not resolve journalism’s crisis of trust, but it does offer a tested vocabulary and methodology for thinking carefully about how knowledge is cooperatively produced with communities rather than about them. We argue that ethnographic reporting belongs within engaged journalism as one of its constituent forms—one available to any practitioner across the movement, and capable of deepening its shared work and processing towards shared goals.

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Dr. Adam Gamwell is a cultural anthropologist, award-winning media creator, and entrepreneur working where human science meets storytelling and technology. As co-founder of Theorist, Inc., he builds AI technology accountable to the researchers and communities it learns from. Understanding the right story can change hearts and catalyze action, Adam has built a body of public-facing work across journalism, media, and consulting to equip individuals and organizations with skills and platforms to turn insight into impactful narratives and strategies. His north star is ensuring that as AI reshapes work, creativity, business, and everyday life, we foreground human values, equity, and empowerment—strengthening people’s voice and influence, not merely keeping them in the loop. Affiliations: Anthrocurious and Centre for Anthropology and Journalism. Email: adam@anthrocurious.com

Emily Kennedy is the Director of the Centre for Anthropology and Journalism. She holds a B.A. in anthropology (UVic) and a masters in journalism (Carleton University). Previously, she engaged with communities as a senior editor and editor-in-chief on mastheads published by St. Joseph Communications and iPolitics, as well as an instructor position with Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication as their community liaison. She is passionate about the ways anthropology and journalism can work together, and her work has been taught by journalism educators internationally and at journalism and anthropology conferences across North America and in Europe. Affiliations: Centre for Anthropology and Journalism. Email: emily@anthrojourno.org

Disclaimers
Generative artificial intelligence chatbots assisted with the formatting of the references list and with English to French translations.

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^[1]  While sociology—particularly the Chicago School tradition associated with Robert Park and colleagues—made foundational contributions to ethnographic methods, including participant observation and urban fieldwork, this paper focuses on the anthropological tradition. The two disciplines have developed distinct but overlapping ethnographic approaches: sociology’s tradition has tended toward domestic and institutional settings, while anthropology developed ethnography as a cross-cultural method. For a discussion of the disciplinary boundary, see Anderson (2015).